WHAT YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU KNEW

THE PRIMARY OBSTACLE TO faith in God is not what we don't know. It's what we don't know that we know.

The effort of prominent modern defenders of the Christian faith has been to secure credentials that they don't need in order to prove to people something that they already know. These apologists have acquiesced to and are reinforcing the idea that only certain, qualified people can have meaningful conversations on crucial issues in the public arena. Their rolls now include the names of scientists, professors, and scholars who want to present an overwhelming rational and academic case for faith that proves that people should believe in God. For instance, Lee Strobel's popular The Case for Christ is written from the perspective of a reporter who flies across the country interviewing experts in various fields to assess whether or not there is reason to believe. The implication is that the public is awfully lucky to have researchers capable of doing the necessary legwork, because otherwise they might not be able to make an informed decision. These contemporary Christian leaders are hiding their clergy robes under lab coats and power suits. Intending to best the secular, academic opposition at their own game, they've declared a calculated frontal assault on the frontal lobe.

It isn't going to work.

The whole enterprise is based on the assumption that the evidence of God must be found, investigated, and tested. The investigator must be objective, inquisitive, and educated. The result has not been a vast audience of convinced believers. The result has been an audience that is shrinking.

I remember seeing the results of this method plainly one night.

As the millennium came to a close, in a bustling lecture hall filled with hundreds of fidgeting spectators, a sweaty, suit-clad panel of six debaters squared off over the rationale for intelligent design, evolution, science, religion, and the decision-making prowess of the board of education. A cone of light shone down over them from above so as to suggest that God had paused to pay attention.

They debated, argued, pleaded, cajoled, and concluded with complete confidence on either side of the line.

At the end of the debate, the moderator whimsically turned over his shoulder and called out into the densely packed crowd, "How many of you have actually changed your minds on the subject tonight?" He shielded his eyes from the overhead spotlights and peered into the throng. "Six," he reported. Given that both sides had presented competently, it may have been a net of zero conversions.

The failure is based on two misunderstandings.

First, the most prominent contemporary defenders of the Christian faith have lost touch with human experience. The problem with their method is that they don't take into account the way that faith actually takes root in the human heart. Most people who believe in anything, religious or otherwise, did not get there by listening to a debate, and meaningful beliefs do not often rest on academic research. That isn't to suggest that faith and reason are unrelated. There are those who think God gave reason to humanity the way a father gives a BB gun to his son, telling him, "You can play with that thing all you want. Just don't point it at me." To the contrary. In fact, the Scriptures say that God intends for people to come looking for him (Matthew 7:7-12). He isn't afraid of our reasoning. Rather, I mean only to say that modern apologists, bearing PhDs and trained in professional oratory, require the curious to acquire difficult educational credentials just to understand conversations about the existence of God. They imply that the casual observer doesn't have the mental faculties necessary to consider the question. The only hope for uncertain investigators is that they might rely upon a qualified biblical scholar, academic, or rhetorician who can assure them that the proofs of God's existence are in fact satisfactory. Unless they have time to go to seminary, they're just going to have to pray someone else will figure out the right answers for them. In fact, belief is not a graduation gift. You don't have to buy a telescope to look for what the naked eye can see.

If the first failure of modern defenders of Christianity is to require excessive credentials, the second is to assume that their listeners are a blank slate. It's the idea that the person to whom Christianity is presented is either neutral and can make an objective decision for or against Christianity, or worse yet, justifiably skeptical and must be convinced. The pressure is then entirely on the presenter to be sufficiently persuasive. The listener remains safely unobligated.

In fact, the Bible starts in a radically different place, stating outright that everyone already has enough evidence to believe and in fact has no excuse for not believing. The Scriptures mean for this to be every bit as brash as it sounds, and its authors offer no apology. Scriptures claim that God's work can be seen in nature (Psalm 19:1-6), that humanity itself bears the irrevocable image of God (Genesis 1:27), that people's intuitions for God may actually be pointing them in the right direction (Acts 17:16-34), and that people are obligated to believe in God (Romans 1:20).

Far from being a blank slate, human beings come with things written on them in large letters.

The aim of this book is to empower the rest of us to discover that we already sense that God exists and in fact depend on God's existence. Without any technical expertise, the open-hearted and level-headed observer already has enough information to find God (Romans 1:20), because in fact God isn't far from any one of us (Acts 17:27). This is a new approach to considering faith that is far less a matter of exploring data and argumentation and more a matter of exposing the knowledge that we already carry around with us, albeit sometimes unknowingly.

You're about to find out how much you didn't know you knew.

Latent Knowledge

BRAINS DON'T WORK LIKE a blank marker board that someone comes along to write on. Sometimes things get "written" on the brain inadvertently, and then the brain itself moves around the letters. We're not entirely conscious of what we are learning or what our brains are doing with the knowledge. Our brains can distort knowledge. Sometimes our brains hide knowledge.

Sometimes we don't know what we know.

When a person remembers where he left his car keys or the remote, that memory was knowledge that he already possessed but that was somehow momentarily veiled. After all, it was he who left the keys on the roof of the car, and that memory was somewhere in his head. Perhaps he couldn't remember because he was trolling around in the frontal cortex of his brain looking for something that he was actually keeping in his hippocampus (which is also a strange place to leave keys). Sometimes people recover memories by retracing the chain of events leading up to the moment that is now veiled. They talk...